Chapter 8 - The Dominoes Fall
The collapse of the Vance family did not take place in the quiet dignity of a private office; it happened on the front lawn of Brenda Vance's brick ranch house outside of Ocala, beneath the flat, gray heat of a central Florida August.
Two flatbed tow trucks from the Marion County Sheriff’s Department were idling in the driveway, their hydraulic lifts whining as they prepared to hook Suzanne’s late-model BMW 4-Series by its rear axle.
"You can't do this!" Suzanne was screaming, running across the dead St. Augustine grass in her slippers, her hair unwashed, her face pale and sunken without the weekly micro-needling treatments she could no longer afford. "The court order was for Derek! Not for me! This is my car!"
A female deputy sheriff with a wide-brimmed straw hat stood between Suzanne and the truck, holding a certified copy of the writ of execution.
"The vehicle was purchased with funds traced directly to the King Maritime Trust, ma'am," the deputy said without emotion. "Under the civil forfeiture order signed by Judge Martinez on Thursday, all assets listed in Schedule C are subject to immediate seizure for restitution. Step back from the vehicle, or you will be detained for obstruction."
"Mom!" Suzanne shrieked, whirling toward the front porch. "Do something! Call Peter!"
Brenda Vance was sitting in a plastic lawn chair beside the screen door, surrounded by cardboard moving boxes.
She looked eighty years old.
Her hair, which had been colored bright blonde every three weeks for thirty years, was showing two inches of stark, iron-gray roots. The title deed to the house had been signed over to the trust forty-eight hours earlier; Arthur Campbell had given her seven days to vacate the premises before the private liquidation auction began.
"Peter dropped us, Suzanne," Brenda said, her voice hollow, dead, staring straight ahead at the scrub oaks across the road. "Peter told me if I called his office again, he was going to bill me for the postage on the drop letters. We don't have a lawyer. We don't have a car. We have eighteen boxes of Tupperware and three thousand dollars in a checking account that the state is auditing."
"This is Derek's fault!" Suzanne yelled, her face turning that ugly, mottled purple that ran in their family whenever they didn't get their way. "He promised me! He told me he was going to take care of us! He told me Skylar was weak! He said she was an insecure heiress who would do whatever he said if he just kept her off balance!"
"Your brother," Brenda said, turning her head slowly to look at her daughter with eyes full of pure, concentrated venom, "is currently eating boiled bologna on white bread in the reception center at Lake Butler. He’s going to be there for thirty-six months. And when he gets out, he owes four hundred thousand dollars to a collection firm that charges nine percent interest."
The tow truck’s winch groaned.
The BMW’s tires left two long, black rubber streaks on the cracked asphalt of the driveway as the steel cables hauled it up onto the diamond-plate bed.
Suzanne watched her leather seats—the ones she had bragged about on Instagram for eighteen months—disappear down the two-lane country highway behind the yellow flashing lights of the wrecker.
She had sixty-four dollars in her purse.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. It wasn't a call from an agency or an invitation to a boat party in Coconut Grove. It was an automated text message from an Amazon customer service facility in Lake City, confirming that her onboarding interview for the third-shift seasonal intake queue was scheduled for Monday at five-thirty in the morning.
Uniform requirements: closed-toe rubber-soled shoes and a plain navy polo shirt.
Suzanne sank down onto the grass, the dirt soaking through the thin fabric of her pajama bottoms, and began to wail into the humid, indifferent country air.
Nobody came out of the neighboring houses to check on her.
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In Ocala, people knew what the sheriff’s flatbeds meant. They just pulled their blinds down and went back to their televisions.
***
